


reliance

by wastrelwoods



Series: where the heart is [4]
Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Blood and Injury but not enough to warrant the graphic violence warning, Cuddling & Snuggling, Hurt/Comfort, Other, Sickfic, Stitches, just...the purest h/c i have wrote YET, some trust stuff. some of that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-17 13:31:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12366795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wastrelwoods/pseuds/wastrelwoods
Summary: Peter's always taken care of himself.





	reliance

After the dust settles, Juno and Peter head home. 

Juno stops at that corner store down the road from his apartment complex to pick up beer and bandaids while Peter waits outside. It's just after three in the morning, and he is, as usual, the only customer there. The fluorescent lights sizzle and flicker overhead. The cashier gives Juno a familiar, tired nod.

When he pushes through the door back out onto the street, Peter's leaning up against the brick wall, rising casually back to his feet. His left arm had been dangling at an unnatural angle when Juno walked in, bone jutting unpleasantly at the shoulder, and now it wasn't. He held it a bit stiffly at his side, but otherwise gave no indication that the injury had ever been there at all.

Juno tries not to stare, but he worries his lower lip with his teeth while he holds the beer bottle up to a bruise on his temple. Peter takes care of himself. 

There's a faint sheen of sweat across his forehead, and his face is drawn and grey. But Juno only notices because he knew to look for it. 

They limp up the stairs to Juno's floor, half-leaning against one another. Peter slides his hand into Juno's back pocket and rests his weight on his shoulder, like he could hold himself up if he really wanted to, like Juno's presence there beside him is merely incidental, rather than a necessity to keep him from tumbling back down the steps. Juno's ankle is throbbing where it twisted under a falling crate. He can't hide the pain of it half so well as Nureyev can. 

He tosses the shopping bag and his keys on the counter with a long groan, and walks Nureyev to the couch, where he deposits himself daintily and begins rooting through the cushions for his first-aid kit. Juno watches him a moment longer, something heavy settling in his chest. But these days, at least, he's taken to keeping one around the house besides the one usually crammed in the bottom of a coat pocket. Like he expects to come by often enough to put it to use. 

And really, Juno would prefer he never had to use it at all. But he's already gotten more than he rightfully deserves out of this deal. 

He shrugs off his coat with a quiet groan and tosses it to the floor, cracks open the beer that's almost gone flat with the heat already and drinks deep. Cheap stuff. Still, it washes the lingering taste of iron from his teeth. 

Juno wanders around the apartment, not bothering even to turn on the lights, shrugging out of his bloodied shirt and pulling a cleaner one from the first pile he comes across, washing his face in the bathroom sink, crossing back across the hall to pull a bag of cloned corn from the freezer and hold it up to his throbbing head. 

Then, from the living room, he hears a soft hiss, low and sharp. Peter cuts himself off so quickly he's almost certain he imagined it, but when he turns he can see Nureyev folded in on himself between those ragged couch cushions, every line of his face tense with pain. He's got his shirt pulled halfway up to expose the angry red line of the knife wound in his side, and his head thrown back against the cushions like he can't hold it up any longer.

There's a bloodied washcloth thrown over one arm of the couch, and a curving threaded needle resting atop that. The faint copper smell makes Juno's stomach churn, and he drains the rest of the beer to quell the rising pang of nausea. 

Peter's always taken care of himself. Doesn't like anyone else to see him hurting. And Juno can respect that. He can. 

He just. Can't help noticing Peter's pain even when he tries his best to hide it, is all. 

Christ, that shoulder had been dislocated, Juno was sure. He'd seen it happen, heard that loud, ugly pop. He screws his eye shut and covers it with the bag of corn while Peter shifts and picks up the needle and then hisses again, sharper this time. 

And really, what the hell is Juno supposed to do with that? Peter knows as well as he does he's helpless with this kind of thing. Taking care of people. Fixing things, making them better, treating them with anything approaching tenderness--

Peter swears under his breath and sighs. “Juno, love?”

Juno shifts the corn away from his eye to glance towards the couch. Peter's face is open and friendly and only a little strained at the edges. He makes the appropriate grunt of comprehension. 

“Do you have a moment?” Peter asks, with a grimace Juno’s never seen before. “I thought I could manage the stitches myself, but it seems my shoulder won't cooperate this evening.” 

The rest of him seems to agree with that assertion, too, the little tremble in his hands and the sweat still beading down his neck and the glassy shine to his bright eyes. Juno swallows tight around the lump in his throat, and limps closer.

It’s a barbaric older method, the needle and thread. Juno recognizes it. Cheaper and more accessible than an automatic stitcher, but slow. Crude. Painful. He crouches beside Peter and takes the needle from his hand, staring at it a long moment with apprehension. Sasha sewed up the back of his shoulder with one of these, when they were kids. Hurt like hell, but he'd passed out halfway through so at least he’d been spared the better part of the experience. 

Left a jagged, puckering scar in his skin. Not something Juno minds, himself, but Peter can't afford to bear a mark like that. Not in his line of work. 

“I don't know how to use this thing,” he warns, hoarsely, and Peter offers him a tired smile. 

“I'll talk you through it.” He sits up with a wince, grabbing at Juno's arm to steady himself. Juno looks at his face so he won't have to look at the gash in his side, and can't find any of that worry he feels reflected there.

Of all the dangerous, unsettling things Peter Nureyev is in the habit of doing, putting his trust blindly in Juno is by far the worst. He grasps at the needle, and tries not to meet Peter's eyes again in case it makes his hands start to shake that much harder. 

Peter's voice is thin but steady as he starts to walk Juno through the process. The hand on his shoulder migrates slowly higher until his long fingers are running lightly through Juno's hair. Like he's the one who needs soothing. “Now, you'll want to start in the center….”

It's slow work. Every little cry of pain Peter has to muffle makes Juno tense and fantasize briefly about throwing himself through the nearest window. He wants to stop, wants to beg for forgiveness, can't think of a single goddamn way to make it better besides stooping to press a kiss to Peter's knee before tying off the thread again. Of all the people he could have picked to hand his heart to, pluck the vulnerable thing right out of his chest and give it over to the unworthy safekeeping of human hands, he chose Juno. Juno, whose track record with fragile things...leaves something to be desired.

Juno presses the needle back in, and Peter's hand tightens in his hair, his breath hitching so slightly Juno might not have noticed if he hadn't been expecting it. “Shh, almost done. This is the last one,” he promises, the unfamiliar gentleness sitting awkwardly on his shoulders.

But Peter nods and relaxes his grip again, leaving Juno to his work. He's still sweating, flushed, shivering a little where Juno's fingers brush his skin, and seeing him so close and vulnerable leaves Juno with a painful gnawing sensation behind his ribs. “That's it, Peter,” he mumbles, thoughtlessly, turning into his hand and pressing his lips to the pulse point in his wrist, quickly. 

The last knots are finished a moment later, leaving Juno to worry over his handiwork while Peter sinks deeper into the cushions, head lolling. “Bandages,” Juno blurts, pulling away too fast to search through the kit that's lying open on the table. “I should--shit, Peter, you're shaking.” 

“M'not,” he lies, and Juno drops the roll of gauze to press his hand over Peter's forehead. 

There’s a strange, lightheaded instant of deja vu, maybe a sense memory set off by the motion, and all Juno can think about is the Martian tomb, lying next to Peter in the flickering half-light and fighting every moment just to make it to the next alive. And echoes of a time long, long before that, too, that early part of Juno’s life where he first looked into another pair of bright eyes and thought _I’m all he has in this whole galaxy. I have to protect that._

He shakes himself out of it, reaches over to draw a blanket over Peter’s shoulders. This is different. 

Maybe not different enough, though. 

“You’re burning up, you idiot,” he grumbles, ducking back to Peter’s side to wrap the wound with a slightly harried speed, ignoring the twinge that shoots through his ankle when he shifts position. “Have to grab--no, damnit, there’s no painkillers left in the cupboard, I forgot. I’ll call Rita, tell her to pick some up and bring it by. Oh, soup! I can make soup, might be some seasoning cubes in the back of the--” He staggers to his feet, winces, stops when Peter’s hand wraps around his wrist.

“I can think of one better remedy,” he says, raspy and soft, tugging at Juno as if to drag him back, and his hands are strong and sure but not tonight. “Come here, Juno,” Peter pleads, and Juno follows, sinking into the couch and pulling Peter closer, his head pillowed on Juno’s chest so a soft tuft of dark hair tickles his chin. 

“Don’t fall asleep,” Juno warns, breathing deep and feeling Peter’s weight shift gently with the rise and fall of his diaphragm. “My back can’t handle this couch for a full night.” 

“Of course not,” Peter tells him, sleepily. “Just need to rest my eyes...for a bit….” 

The copper odor still lingers in the air, along with the tang of disinfectant, but when Juno presses his nose to the crown of Peter’s head he can still smell that cologne, rich and lovely and more familiar with every passing day. More like home. 

He reaches down to pluck Peter’s glasses from his face and set them down on the table, next to the lamp and the roll of bandages and the slowly thawing bag of cloned corn. He mumbles in his sleep and turns his face into Juno’s body with a soft, sharp-toothed smile. 

Juno feels the breath catch in his chest, and sighs. Adjusts the blanket so Peter’s covered and surrounded and warm. Sends a quick message to Rita about the painkillers, and then a follow-up to let her know he’d gotten home in one piece. Keeps his arms wrapped firmly around Peter and watches the neon shift through the curtain of acid rain outside the window. 

There’s some big, heavy, jagged-edged thought about trust settling onto his shoulders, but Juno can’t find the right way to put it into words just yet. But he’s got a lot to consider. Some kind of decision to make, probably, and if experience tells him anything it won’t be an easy one. Weighing and measuring. Things he’s done. Things he’s failed to do. Things he deserves and things he knows he never will, not if he lived a thousand years. 

But maybe he’s got more important things to do than try to unravel all of that here and now. 

Peter snores softly into his shirt, his fingers curling over Juno’s collarbone. And Juno lets go of the breath he’s been holding in. Closes his eye. Lets himself think, maybe if this man trusts him, he can let that be enough.

**Author's Note:**

> gotta love that good good tpp discord and the sad talks we've gotten up to there in the last couple o weeks! i hear angst is the new favorite team-building exercise


End file.
